Deeper into the machine: Learning to speak digital

Computers and Composition 19 (2002) 371–386

Deeper into the machine: Learning to speak digital�

N. Katherine Hayles∗

University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1530, USA

1. Introduction

Composition Studies has already made impressive advances in meeting the challenges posedby electronic textuality, including the introduction of computers into writing classrooms, em-ployment of MOO spaces and other network environments in writing instruction, developmentof intelligent software to aid in writing, and increased incorporation of visual rhetoric in thepractice and criticism of writing instruction. Further change is needed to take full advantage ofthe rich multimedia capabilities offered by contemporary reading and writing practices. Themove toward visual rhetoric is a welcome addition to the canon of traditional verbal strategies,but images are only one component among several new additions to the repertoire of electronicwriting. To help our students learn to write effectively in digital media, we need to developmodes of critical attention responsive to the full range of semiotic components that can beused as signifying elements in electronic work, including animation, sound, graphics, screendesign, and navigational functionalities. In effect, we must learn to speak digital.

One way to develop this critical competence is to track the changes literature is undergoingas it moves into the computer. By closely analyzing works of electronic literature, especiallythose that reflect upon as well as embody rhetorical practices specific to digital domains, wecan gain insight into the possibilities of electronic writing and mobilize them as resources tochart new directions for the field of computers and composition. The past few years have seenrapid development in electronic literature as it has moved beyond the print-based assumptionscharacteristic of first-generation texts into second-generation works that increasingly exploit thecapabilities offered by digital environments. Media can be thought of as collective intelligencesthat explore their conditions of possibility by trying to discover what they are good for. Theseattempts, in turn, feed back into technological innovation to transform their conditions of

� Keynote address at the 2002 Computers and Writing Conference in Normal, IL.∗ Email address:[email protected] (N.K. Hayles).

8755-4615/02/$ – see front matter © 2002 N. Katherine Hayles. Published by Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.PII: S8755-4615(02)00140-8

372 N.K. Hayles / Computers and Composition 19 (2002) 371–386

possibility. Film learns that it can use shadow and light to create images resonant with emotionalsignificance and meaning; this heightened sensitivity to gray tones is succeeded by the plungeinto color, where the expanded palette allows for still more extensive use of the visible spectrumas a reservoir of signifying practices. Riding on the coat tails of software developers, electronicliterature has seen its conditions of possibility dramatically transformed since its inception.

So rapid has been the development that one can speak of two generations of works. Datingthe watershed between the generations is a matter of critical debate, but most people agree itfalls somewhere between 1995 and 1997. First-generation works, often written in StorySpaceor HyperCard, are largely or exclusively text-based with navigation systems mostly confinedto moving from one block of text to another. Second-generation works, authored in a widevariety of software, including Director, Flash, Shockwave andxml, are fully multimedia,employ a rich variety of interfaces, and have sophisticated navigation systems. The trajectorytraced by developments subsequent to 1997 can be broadly characterized as moving deeperinto the machine. Increasingly electronic literature devises artistic strategies to create effectsspecific to electronic environments.

This specificity can be explored through a series of works that construct the relation betweenmachine, work, and user to discover what it means to write, read, and inhabit a coded medium.The first work I will discuss isdatabase, an installation created by Adriana de Souza e Silva andFabian Winkler and exhibited at the Electronic Literature Organization’sSymposium: State ofthe Artsin Los Angeles in April 2002, interrogates the assumptions embedded in the interfacesof screen, printer, and projector by inverting them, a process that brings them into visibility forthe viewer and invites meditation on the presuppositions they instantiate.

The second set of works interrogates how interfaces and the machines that process them con-struct subjectivity. Particularly important for these works is the realization that natural and ma-chine languages mingle in the production of electronic literature. While the user parses words,the machine reads code. These works are not content to let code remain below the surface butrather show it erupting through the surface of the screen to challenge the hegemony of alpha-betic language.Talan Memmott’s (2002b)“Translucidity” <http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/frame6/>andMEZ’s (2002a)“mezangelled” productions (see The Data][H][Bleeding Tools andNonCompos MentisZen Tripping the Non-Conference Circuitry, both online) push toward thecreation of a creole comprised of English and code. These works draw on the literary traditionand programming protocols to ask what it means for contemporary users to be constructed byboth. What kinds of subjects are spoken by this creole? What kinds of subjectivities are impliedby the interfaces created by these works, and what is their relation to the machines that writethem?

Another way to push deeper into the machine is to construct the screen as a world theuser is invited to enter. “The Many Voices of St. Caterina of Pedemonte” by Alison Walkerand Silvia Rigon illustrates how the creation of a world in electronic environments differsfrom the verbally constructed worlds of print literature. This work employs animation, sound,graphics, and navigation as semiotic components working together with words to create mul-tiple interpretive layers focusing on the spiritual practices of a fictional medieval mystic, SaintCaterina. As the different voices offer varying perspectives, the user is immersed in a richlyimaged and layered topography where the church hierarchy, academic scholars, the massof believers, and the female saint contest for the meaning and significance of her mystical

http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/frame6/

N.K. Hayles / Computers and Composition 19 (2002) 371–386 373

experiences. InM. D. Coverley’s (2002)electronic novel,The Book of Going Forth by Day(<http://califia.hispeed.com/Egypt/>), the inscription technology producing the fictional worldis foregrounded as part of the meaning. Navigation here does more than offer access to thework, becoming an important part of the work’s signifying structure and creating meaningthrough the functionalities it offers to the user.

As critics and theorists encounter these works, they discover that the established vocabularyof print criticism is not adequate to describe and analyze them. The language that electronicliterature is creating requires a new critical language as well, one that recognizes the specificityof the digital medium as it is instantiated in the signifying practices of these works. This newcritical vocabulary will recognize the interplay of natural language with machine code; it willnot stay only at the screen but will consider as well the processes generating that surface; it willunderstand that interplays between words and images are essential to the work’s meaning; itwill further realize that navigation, animation and other digital effects are not neutral devices butdesigned practices that enter deeply into the work’s structures; it will eschew the print-centricassumption that a literary work is an abstract verbal construction and focus on the materialityof the medium; and it will toss aside the presupposition that the work of creation is separatefrom the work of production and evaluate the work’s quality from an integrated perspectivethat sees creation and production as inextricably entwined.

This is, of course, a tall order. Nothing less than forging a new critical vocabulary, however,will suffice to account for the new languages that contemporary electronic literature is creating.Critics must follow writers deeper into the machine, learning as we go the idioms that emergewhen humans collaborate with intelligent machines to create the literature of the twenty-firstcentury.

2. Interrogating the interface

Souza and Winklerdatabaseplay with the idea that the materiality of technology should bethrust into visibility as a way to bring into consciousness assumptions that we normally takefor granted. It undertakes this enterprise by reversing and subverting the technology’s usualoperations. The installation consists of a computer screen displaying virtual text, a printer witha miniature video camera attached, and a projection displaying the camera’s output. Sitting inthe printer are sheets of paper full of text, the exterior database for the project. When the usermoves the cursor over the white computer screen, black rectangles appear that cover over mostof the text, along with keywords that fade into white again when the cursor moves away—unless the user chooses to click, in which case the keyword is also covered by a black rectangle.At the same time, the click sends a message to the camera to focus on a second keyword in theexterior database related to the first through agonistic relation, perhaps an antonym or otheroppositional tension. For example, clicking onperpetuallyon the screen makestoo fastappearon the wall projection; the screenicpromiselinks to the projectedpast. After a few clicks, thescreen is dotted with black rectangles. The user can then click on a red dot at the upper rightcorner to activate aprint command. The printer sends through the sheet full of prewritten text,blacking out the keywords chosen by the user as the camera gives a fleeting glimpse of thembefore they disappear. The obliterations create alterations in the database’s text that change its

http://califia.hispeed.com/Egypt/


meaning, so the database the user reads as it emerges from the printer is not the same as it waswhen seen on screen.

The artists’ statement by Souza and Winkler makes clear the project’s complexity. Inversionsoperate throughout the apparatus to challenge conventional assumptions. The printer obliteratesrather than inscribes words; the database is stored as marks on paper rather than binary codeinside the computer; clicking blacks out visible words rather than stabilizing them; the camera“reads” but does not record; and the projection displays words oppositional to the ones theuser has chosen. The inversions create new sensory, physical, and meta-physical relationshipsbetween the interactor and the database. Printing, a technique normally associated with creatingexternal memory storage, here transforms a mark into an obliteration. The video camera, usuallylinked with storage technologies that make a permanent record, here makes writing ephemeraland transitory, disappearing from the projection as the word is inked out. The database, ratherthan residing at physically inaccessible sites as bit strings dispersed throughout the hard drive,is here constituted as linear text the user can literally hold in her hands.

These inversions recall the distinctionLev Manovich (2001)made between narrative anddatabase in his pioneeringThe Language of New Media. While narrative is the dominant formof print literature, Manovich argued, database is the native idiom of the computer. He notedthat database inverts the relation between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic that obtains withprint text. For print the syntagmatic, inhering in the order of the sentence, is visibly presenton the page, whereas the paradigmatic, inhering in alternatives that could be substituted for agiven word, is virtual, imaginable as a conceptual possibility but not physically realized. Witha database, however, the possible choices are physically present as encoded data, whereas thesyntagmatic order created by their assembly is virtual, a possibility that can be realized onlywhen the appropriate commands are executed (pp. 212–285).

This inversion of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic is playfully referenced by the pre-printedsheet, which serves as an actual paradigmatic array and also an emergent narrative created onthe fly by the printer’s obliterations overwriting some of the inscriptions. The significanceof these inversions is broadened by the prose constituting the database, selected from writersmeditating on time and memory, includingJorge Luis Borges’s (1988)“The Immortals.” In thisfiction, the narrator is searching for the City of Immortals. He discovers a tribe of troglodytes,seemingly subhuman creatures that cannot speak, do not sleep, and eat barely enough to keepalive. The narrator decides to teach one of them to speak, only to discover that the creatureis the poet Homer. Following Borges’s logic, Souza and Winkler point out that immortalitydrastically alters one’s relationship to time. Because time for an immortal stretches in anendless horizon, the future ceases to have meaning; the future is precious for mortals becausethey understand their lives have finite horizons. The immortals, by contrast, live in a presentthat obliterates the past and devours the future, becoming absolute, permanent, and infinite.Saturated by memories stretching into infinity, the immortals become incapable of action,paralyzed by thoughts that have accumulated through eons without erasure. Seen in light ofthis story, the obliterations that the printer creates can be read as inscriptions of mortality,nonsignifying marks that paradoxically signify the ability to forget, a capability the immortalsdo not have.

Just as the printer plays with time by linking inscribing/obliterating with immortality/morta-lity, so the wall projection plays with time by linking writing/speaking with visibility/invisibility.


The words projected on the wall function as visible inscriptions, but inscriptions that behavelike speaking because they disappear as the printer inks out the selected word. Writing, a tech-nology invented to preserve speech from temporal decay, here is made to instantiate the veryephemerality it was designed to resist. The interactor’s relation to this writing is reconfiguredto require the same mode of attention one normally gives to speech. If one’s thoughts wanderand attention lapses while listening to someone speak, it is impossible to go back and recoverwhat was lost, in contrast to rereading a passage in a book. Moreover, the wall projectiondoes not repeat the word the viewer selected on screen but rather substitutes another wordorthogonally related to it. Blacked out as soon as the interactor clicks on it, the screen wordbecame unavailable to visual inspection. The interactor can “remember” it only by attemptingto triangulate on it using the projected word, which requires her to negotiate a relationshipconstructed by someone else through the fields of meaning contained in the database. But assoon as the interactor prints the database out, it is altered by the obliteration of the words sheselected, which also changes the meaning of the narrative that provides the basis for the rela-tionship between screenic and projected words. Thus, the interactor is in the position of tryingto negotiate meanings whose significances are changed by her attempt to understand them.

It is no accident that thedatabaseinterventions are positioned at the points where words aretransported from one medium to another. The functionalities that allow us to print out a screenor project it onto a vertical surface make it easy for us to forget the technological mediations thatmake these everyday activities possible, and more crucially to forget the embedded assumptionsthey instantiate. Screen text is not print, and a projected light image is not a scanning electronbeam. The inscription technologies of screen, print and projection each has its own specificities,and each constructs the user in a distinctive sensory, cognitive, and material relation. What wedare not forget, database implies through its focus on remembering and forgetting, is thatthe technology is both a machine and an incarnation of assumptions embedded in its formand function. These assumptions interpenetrate the work, or better, commingle with it in afusion that requires rethinking the ideology that a literary work is an abstract immaterialentity. Bringing our assumptions into view through these subversions and inversionsdatabasefacilitates this creative revisioning.

3. Interfacing subjectivity

In “The Data][H][Bleeding Texts”, MEZ (Mary-Anne Breeze) gives an “Electroduction” toher “polysemic language/code system” (<http://www.netwurker.de/mez/datableed/complete>).She calls the system “mezangelle,” describing it as a way to extend the meaning of wordsand sentences “beyond the predicted or expected.” Besides containing MEZ’s pen name,“mezangelle” also suggests mangling, appropriate in its ordinary meaning as a process thatdeterritorializes and reterritorializes word fragments. “Mangle” also has a specialized program-ming meaning, referring to a process whereby a program associates a file name longer than 8bits, the maximum length a computer can store, with an arbitrary combinations of symbols 8bits long. Thus, a human can give a name likeDatableedingto a file that will enable easy recall,and mangling mediates between this human-meaningful name and a bit string the computercan store. Mangling thus works as a translator between natural language and code.

http://www.netwurker.de/mez/datableed/complete


The pun on mangling points toward the play on code and English that is at the heart of themezangelle language system. Inserting “programming language-shards and operating systemechoes” into English, MEZ works within the environments of email lists and chat rooms tocreate poem-like objects that display in their structure and syntax the interplay of human lan-guage and machine code. She thinks of the context for her works as an “environment x.clusivelyreliant” on software functionalities, and the works explore the significance of interminglinglanguage and code for the fictional voices that speak within it. At first her pieces consisted ofmezangelled text (along with, of course, the underlying code that formatted them for electronicenvironments). Recently, however, she has moved into creating enhanced works that include inaddition to “mezangelled” text animation, graphics, and sound. She has also self-consciouslybegun reaching out to a wider audience, giving hints and explanations about how to read andcomprehend her texts, a venture about which she nevertheless voices misgivings.

In Non Compos Mentis: ZenTripping the Non-Conference Circuitry, a work included inher recent online collection][ad][Dressed in a Skin Code(<http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/net/wurker/>), MEZ (2002b)provides both the mezangelled and plaintext, so that the polysemy in-troduced by mezangelling can be easily seen. A section entitled “Back-and-Foregrounding” inthe plaintext descries the transformation of sensibility that occurs when the persona encountersthe computer and is forever transformed:

A Mezzian Flesh-Mote enters a library. In a networked sense this library is cold; binary dataadvancements are yet to make any perceivable impact on its manifest functions. A silveredsliver-glint pulls the Mezzian Mote forward to the only technoniche available—a computerlaboratory, used primarily for word-processing tasks. It also has an Internet connection. ADatadervish [E-Mote] is born, and a Flesh-Mote is extinguished. (online)

A tale of transformation, the story can only be told from a retrospective view (for it is onlyafter the fact that the transformation can be recognized as such), and this angle of vision isreflected in the vocabulary. “E-mote” is a formation born of the Web, a verb transformed intoa noun by the interjection of a dash that references the electronic (“E”) world and the subjectswho emerge from it. Through back-formation the subject prior to her electrification is nameda “Flesh-mote,” a word that already recognizes the individual will exist in a haze of networkedothers as soon as it transforms into an “E-mote.” Pulled forward by the gleam of the screen,the Flesh-Mote finds the means of her transformation in the computer, primitive though thisparticular laboratory is.

Now consider the mezangelled text in Mez’Non Compos Mentis, which compresses theplaintext and, paradoxically, through compression extends its implications:

.a mezzian flesh-mote enters.

.the libr][bin][ary is cold. a s[]l][i][ver glint pulls the mote 4wards.

.4warding][ing of the datadervish][in2 the][comp][lab lair. (online)

At first it appears that the prose of the plaintext has been converted into poetic lines, atransformation that brings into play the traditional poetic tension between the ending of oneline and the beginning of another. However, in the programming language Perl the dot is aconcatenation operator used to add strings together, so the lines now exist both as discrete unitsand additive lines, with the dot signaling division when read as a period ending a sentence,

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/net/wurker/

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/net/wurker/


and addition when read as a concatenation operator preceding the string. The second line,typical in its use of interjected square brackets, shows how mezangelling works. “Library” canbe recovered as a word, but only after encountering “][bin][ary,” the binary code still largelymissing from this “cold” library. “Binary” is in a sense now hidden or found to be concealedwithin “library,” a form of reading that anticipates the coming transformation of this institutionas it creeps into the information age, a process already begun in its primitive word-processinglaboratory. Read as operators, the brackets in this mezangelled word do not make sense, forthere is no opening bracket for the initial right bracket, and no closing bracket for the final leftbracket. Despite its violation of normal syntax, “][” has a polysemy that draws MEZ to it, forit resembles “I,” the nomination of selfhood, and also “H,” which by back-formation can oftenbe read as “I” in her texts. Although the brackets can be broken apart, “][” often functionsas a symbol in its own right. That the “bin” of binary should be surrounded by this symbolsuggests the implication of the subject “I” in the discovery of the binary within the library, anassociation that the plaintext makes clear in other words.

The “silvered sliver-glint” of the plaintext in Mez’s work is now compressed into a mezan-gelled word that folds “silvered” and “sliver” into one through the interjection of brackets, aprocess that also twice creates the “][” symbol and so interjects the “Mezzian” of the plain-text into the middle of the word, so that now “mote” appears without the preceding adjective.“Forward” becomes “4wards,” a word homophonically recoverable as the plaintext term butalso visually contaminated by a number combined with an English syllable in a creole that sig-nals the in-mixing of code with language. In the mezangelled text, the “Datadervish” is moved“4ward][ing” into a lab, a prescient anticipation of the transformation already encoded by theinterjection of the “][” symbol into the motion of moving forward. “Computer laboratory” inthe plaintext becomes][comp][lab lair,” with the “][” symbol now surrounding “comp,” em-phasizing that the “I” and “computer” have now joined in a space that has also become a “lair,”with the connotation of secrecy, protection, and most of all habitation (online).

The transformation, in the plaintext performed by the assertion that “A Datadervish [E-mote]is born, and a Flesh-mote is extinguished,” is now dramatically enacted by a visual and ver-bal full stop, punningly performed by bolded dots and the word “stop” (Mez,Non ComposMentis, online):

In older programming languages such as Basic, “stop” signaled the end of a routine. Here,however, it is not the program that ends but a certain kind of pre-electronic subjectivity. Aswas the case with the square brackets, the angle brackets function both as visual patterns, hereindicating emphasis, and allusions to code. In C++ they are used to designate extraction (»)and insertion (<<) operators, commands that indicate the program should successively outputor input the terms in a file until all the terms have been used. Read as operators, the bracketspointing right metaphorically indicate terms are being extracted (those comprising the subjectas Flesh-mote), whereas the brackets pointing left indicate terms are being inserted (those ofthe E-mote). The dots above and below this process serve both as dividers and connectors


(when read as concatenation operators), thus marking the splice from one kind of subjectivityto another.

In her brilliant analysis of MEZ’s “code-wurk,”Rita Raley (2001)demonstrated that thereading process is significantly altered with a mezangelled text, for the decoding that normallyconstitutes literary reading is here disrupted by visual signs that have no phonemic equivalent,for example the “][” symbol or a word like “libr][bin][ary” (<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v012/12.1raley.html/>). This is a language that cannot be spoken in all its fullness. The historicevolution of a system of marks tied to oral articulation is disrupted and reencoded as a systemof mixed phonemes and code symbols that can be read and apprehended but not spoken. Thus,la langueof Fredinard de Saussure (1965)and the generations of semioticians following himis displaced by a language system that can be fully understood only by a bilingual reader whoknows both English and code. Spoken language cannot be the desired object of study, as it wasfor Saussure, who saw written language as derivative and secondary. It is not oral articulationbut inscription that is central in this language system and, moreover, inscriptions that go deepinto the machine. As the code symbols continually remind us, the screen text is only the top-most part of the language system; underlying the screen text are layers and layers of codinglanguages essential for producing the surface text.John Cayley (2002)called for analysis of“a set of relationships—relationships constituted by artistic practice—between a new prob-lematized linguistic materiality and represented materiality” (p0es1s, forthcoming). To readmezangelle is to encounter precisely what he means, for through her work we experience aworld in which language is inextricably in-mixed with code and code with language, creatinga creolized discourse in which the human subject is constituted through and by intelligentmachines.

Memmott shares with MEZ an interest in mingling code and English to create a creolizeddiscourse. They differ, however, in their use of visual materials. Originally working onlywith text, MEZ tends to use visual images as illustrations for content, whereas for Memmottimages are part of the content. Coming to electronic literature from a background as a painter,Memmott chooses to enact some concepts through screen design, animation and images ratherthan words. In addition, his work is more idiosyncratic than MEZ’s, whose content, oncedecoded, tends not to be especially esoteric. The idiosyncrasy of Memmott’s work can beunderstood as a large-scale project, stretching over many individual texts, that is designedto deconstruct traditional ideas of selfhood, representation, and affectional relationships byrevealing their ideological bases. In this sense, to use one of his neologisms, the work is notmerely idiosyncratic but ideosyncratic, an experiential art form meant to pry us from ourreceived views by redescribing and representing relationships and subjectivities in terms of anetworked environment in which individual selves blend into a collectivity, human boundariesblur as people merge with technological apparatus, and cultural formations are reconfigured toreflect and embody a cyborgian reality. This redescription, a deep revisioning of what it meansto be human, is ambiguously situated as a development dependent on information technologyand as a truer apprehension of what the human condition has always been. Such an ambitiousproject is not without perils, of course, and at times the texts veer toward the Charybdis ofincomprehensibility or the Scylla of sophomoric generalization. At their best, however, theyare both playful and profound, challenging our visions of ourselves and presenting us withhighly charged enactments of what we may be in the process of becoming.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v012/12.1raley.html/

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v012/12.1raley.html/


The playfulness ofTalan Memmott’s (2002a)work is on display in Ecephalopedia||novellex (<http://www.drunkenboat.com>), a work in which a narrator finds a chalked fig-ure on the sidewalk, as if a dead body has been outlined there. The figure is missing its head,which has been swept away or obscured. The narrator finds himself unable to decide if it is theoutline of Leonardo’s famous drawing of the four-legged and four-armed man representing the“range and radiance” of human proportions or Bataille’s iconoclastic self-portrait showing himholding a dagger in one hand and his ripped-out heart in the other. Because the two images havelittle in common and indeed are ideological opposites—Leonardo’s drawing embodying theideal of “man as the measure of all things” and Bataille’s image an attempt to pollute and fatallycontaminate that vision—the narrator’s confusion is ludicrous. On another level, however, it issignificant, for inasmuch as the two images are one another’s opposites, they both depend uponthe same assumptions, one to instantiate them, the other to refute. “Leonardo becomes Bataille,”the narrator suggests, “—learns alessenfrom Batialle.There was a struggle” (Memmott,E cephalopedia||novellex, online). The lesson/lessen pun effectively makes the point thatthe grand vision of Leonardo, with its implicit generalizations about the human form and sub-ject, is unconsciously imperialistic and must be made more specific, lessened, to retain validity.

The narrator pretends that hewouldbe able to make the distinction between the Leonardo andBataille images if only the head were not missing, another significant confusion since it sug-gests that without the head, the body cannot signify. Here the narrator’s confusion subtly pointsto the insidious nature of a Cartesian view that identifies thinking solely with what happensin the head, making the body more or less superfluous to cognition. “One must RE:member,”the narrator comments punningly on a screen in which the radiant Leonardo head appearswith a bifurcated arrow pointing toward the headless Leonardo body. On another screen, “The[Organ|Engin]eer tries to do his best. . . He thinks, we think Beyond what is,” and the bifur-cated arrow again points to an enlarged image of the Leonardo head. A bolded command reads,“[ </HEAD>@FRONT],” a non-syntactic combination ofhtml coding for “head” followed bya MOO command for location, suggesting again the Cartesian primacy of the head. Following isa screen showing the head floating above the body with the bolded tag “[<HEAD>@BODY]”(Memmott, Ecephalopedia||novellex, online), another non-syntactic combination suggest-ing that the head should after all be included in the description of the body (@ is a command inmany MOO environments that allows the user to input a physical description indicating howshe wishes to be “seen” by other users).

In “Translucidity,” Memmott extends this kind of language–image play to (re)describe theprocess whereby identity can become “adentity,” a form of subjectivity in which the individualescapes from the genetic and psychological encoding of the nuclear family to join an electroniccollectivity. Translucidity is contrasted with transparency, which the work punningly interpretsas the parenting process in which [par1] and [par2] in a “plural act of rendering” create the“3rd face,” the child who must break away from the “couplings and collusive partnerships” thatwould keep him trapped within a model of individualistic selfhood reproduced in turn throughhis acts of (trans)parenting. In comparison, in translucidity “The 3rd is always other as it is I,”suggesting that individuality is an illusion, a mystification of the social and cultural processesthat make everyI a We. In contrast, translucidity would locate the face, signifier of selfhood,at the “outside of an inside that allows for self-observation as self-examination, a testing andplaying with identity as adentity.” Such a transformation is not envisioned without reservations.

http://www.drunkenboat.com


“We find warmth in this de.position of identity, entrusting it to an external repository that isaccessible only through the attachment of some electronic device, needing an other for device,”the narrator comments. The “de.position” of identity both deconstructs and repositions the “I,which can only be we.” Still, this collective I/We is not yet a complete “de.position,” for alsoinvolved is the “I+ device,” which “[N]crusts the earth through hyperactive infofrenzy. . .

the need to know. . . We exp[e|a]nd as we conduct—heat rises; global and lobal warming aresibling” (online). The conjunction of the capitalistic forces that produce global warming withthe “lobal” of the human brain indicates how inextricably mingled are the human and machinein the digital age. Whether the resulting “infofrenzy” will lead to amelioration or catastropheis unclear; all that is certain is that it is the catalyst for unprecedented change.

Throughout Memmott’s “Translucidity” (online) a frequent visual trope is the face, as ifrendering literally the idea of the (inter)face as a connection between a face inside the ma-chine with the faces we wear outside the machine. Moreover, these faces are described asambiguously located at once on the inside and outside, as if they are both looking out fromthe screen and reflecting our faces looking at the screen. In one image, we see a face—theonly visual cue available for clicking—and when we click on it, smaller faces multiply acrossthe screen in a visual enactment of (trans)parental reproduction. On another screen a facepeeps through a clickable round window as if contained within a petri disk or microscopelens, the object or subject of an experiment. In yet another, the face poses as an emblem ofallure (alle.ure), seducing the visitor with the promise “I have what you want” and inviting usto register. If we accept the invitation by clicking, another screen opens with seductive eyeshalf-closed above boxes where we can respond to questions such as “who are you?” “whereare you now?” “what do you want?” and “why are you (t)here?” The promise implicit in thesequestions is not intimacy but what Memmott calls “intertimacy,” a meeting of subject andobject—“[sub|ob]ject]”—in the apparatus. “She, the apparatus is always Ariadne. . . ,” spin-ner of threads, weaver of webs, creating the connections that allow the transformation fromone to “WE,” “[com(mon)|ex][patr|p]iates” (Translucidity, online). Expatriates who expatiate,comrades who are becoming common, this electronic collectivity will be formed not throughtechnological mediation alone but also through art works such as this. With creolized language,transformed subjectivites, and visual/verbal/kinetic (inter)faces, this work images new kindsof faces appropriate to the posthuman subjects it (re)describes.

4. Sensing a world

In The Many Voices of St. Caterina of Pedemonte, sound, animation, image and text are wo-ven together to create a compelling sensory experience. Drawing on their research into the livesof medieval female saints, Alison Walker and Silvia Rigon have created “St. Caterina” as a fic-tional composite constructed to reveal the saint’s subjectivity as a site for contestation betweenfive different perspectives. These are actualized in the text as competing voices represented asarticulated sound and screenic text; each voice is associated also with related visualizations.The opening screen shows an iconographic Valentine-red heart, with white rays going out tosmaller red hearts serving as portals to the different sections. An important component of thework is its interactivity, designed to engage the user’s emotional and psychological responses.


ReferencingManovich’s (2001)observation that interactivity can be metaphorical as well asphysical, they designed the interactivity to function as a “meta-commentary” reinforcing thework’s significance. Moreover, they aimed to craft the individual modalities—sound, sight,kinesthesia—so they would synergistically enhance each other.

Interactivity as meta-commentary can be seen in the rendering of the first voice, the“authorized” version of the Catholic Church, associated with a traditional iconographic render-ing of the saint showing her heart pierced by rays emanating from above. When the user clickson this stereotyped image, it changes to black and white with horizontal lines running across it,emphasizing its textuality and hence its constructedness. As a voice-over begins narrating theChurch’s version of Caterina’s life, the corresponding written text scrolls over the image; onlythat portion outlined by the saint’s body is legible, however, the rest obscured by the transectinglines. As a result, the user can access the full textonlyby listening to the oral narration, a designchoice that reenacts the Church’s mandate that it should act as mediator between the believerand God. The point returns in other guises as St. Caterina experiences a direct connection toGod through her mystical experiences, a claim to immediacy the Church contests. In a subtleway tension is already present in the subordination of the user to the voice-over, a positioningthat strategically lays the groundwork for the user to empathize with Caterina as she struggleswith a Church she both obeys and resists.

The second voice is the academic narrative of Rudolph Bell, whose research into the pen-itential practices of female saints links them with anorexia, an eating disorder with extremelydebilitating effects on the body, up to and including death. This voice is accessed via anotherbeatific image of a haloed saint. As the user clicks on the small red hearts at the corners ofthe image, text begins appearing that describes the primary and secondary effects of anorexia,including such medical symptoms as weakened internal organs and dysfunctional digestivetract. When the user clicks again on the small red hearts, they act as corners that can stretchaway from the surface, partially revealing underneath a naked female body disturbing in itsskeletal form and starvation-ravaged flesh. Whatever the spiritual benefits of fasting, this voicemakes clear its physical cost and, by doing so, draws into question any simple evaluation of itas a spiritual practice.

The third voice is autobiographical, based on the fact that many female saints were orderedby their superiors to write their autobiographies, sometimes drawn out into years of writingand thousands of pages. These autobiographies represent both the writer’s desire to articulateand justify her visions and the superior’s command that she must write them, so that thetext becomes a site of contestation between personal narrative and penitential punishment. Inaddition, when one historical saint was ordered by her superior to write her autobiography, herdescriptions of her mystical raptures so disturbed him that he ordered her to stop immediately,even though it was on his orders that she began to write. St. Caterina’s autobiography beginswith the words, “They made me lick the spiders from the walls,” alluding to a penitentialpractice in which, according to historical records, at least one woman was made to lick spidersas part of her punishment for daring to claim a direct relation to God. Images for this screeninclude spiders that flash over the surface, as if in frenetic imitation of a “Space Invaders”video game. When the text of the autobiography appears it is illegible. Only when the userclicks on the spiders with a cursor imaged as the word “lick” do the first couple of linesclear enough to read. To continue the user must keep clicking on the spiders, experiencing


the text as a barrier that begrudges accessibility and yields only after the user pays the properpenance.

The fourth voice, the most personal and hence the least communicable of all the narratives,is represented in the text as body images. These are manifested not as coherent human shapesbut portions of flesh that have been mutated, stretched and multiplied so that they allude to thebody but cannot themselves be contained within the bounds of a recognizable subject, slippingaway into ecstatic visions that hint at the unspeakable. Similar visions appear on other screensand function as a wall that the user is unable to penetrate, alluding to a feeling frequentlyvoiced by the female saints that their bodies were prisons from which they could not escape,save by death. Feeling themselves imprisoned within flesh and bones, some resolved to takeas nourishment only the Sacrament of Christ’s body, determined to ingest only the food that,transformed into flesh, would connect them to Christ’s divine incarnation. Here functionalityfor the user—or rather non-functionality—is figured as resistance. Just as the saints could notescape their bodies, so, too, no amount of manipulation by the user will allow her to pass theimage of that mortal coil.

The final voice is a straightforward oral narration that tells the passage of Caterina’s heartfrom a body organ to a historical artifact. The screen is dominated by a pulsating anatomicallycorrect heart that, beating in diastolic rhythm, transforms into the blasé red heart of traditionaliconography. The alternation between romanticized image and medical accuracy creates anironic tension that permeates as well the oral narration. The narrator tells us that when Cate-rina dies her body is ripped to shreds by believers seeking a souvenir. Her heart, torn fromher chest, is preserved as a relic and enshrined in a church. The implicit irony continues thecontestation that has been present throughout. Although the church is in the end successful inclaiming ownership of Caterina’s heart, its triumph is located within a web of cooperating andcompeting narratives that encourage the user to see the Church’s authorized account as onestory among many. In the layered structure of the work as a whole, the synergies created by itsmultiple sensory modalities tell a story too rich and complex to be reduced to any of its parts.

5. Embodying a world: The Book of Going Forth by Day

“Space” in literary theory and practice is frequently interpreted metaphorically as an imag-inative grid upon which action can be mapped. For writers working with electronic literature,space acquires significantly different meanings. With graphics, animation, and multiple layersat their disposal, writers configure the screenic surface to simulate three-dimensional spacesthat present an illusion of depth and perform as interactive arenas. The importance of thisdevelopment can scarcely be over-emphasized, for it creates possibilities for rich interactionsbetween narrative content, software functionality, and screen display that become part of theelectronic work’s signifying practices.

Among the writers interested in exploring these possibilities is M. D. Coverley, author oftwo major electronic narratives,Califia (2000) andThe Book of Going Forth by Day(2001), aswell as a number of shorter pieces. Particularly important for Coverley is the relation betweenlayered screenic spaces and deep layers of historical and geological time extending through gen-erations, centuries, and even millennia. Visual representations of space on the screen, software


functionality as navigation of space, and verbal accounts of movements through space and timebecome enmeshed in ways that tie together the narrative and the kinesthetic, the user’s actionsand the maker’s design. As the user moves through screenic space, she navigates through dif-ferent narratives, with sites within the work correlating with different focalizations. As a result,the user does not merely read a narrative but enters a world, complete with sound, animation,verbal description, and visual display.

After working five years onCalifia, Coverley decided to make her next large work,TheBook of Going Forth by Day, available on the Web as she continues to work on it. Althoughthe work is still in progress, enough of the overall structure and design is now visible to makecommentary feasible.The Book of Going Forth By Dayhas a tripartite narrative structure anda deep concern with connections between the present and historical past. The entwining tropesfor this work are word and image, particularly their union in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Instead ofthree different narrators, this work has three speaking voices located within the same centralnarrator, corresponding to the Egyptian idea of the tripartite soul. Jeanette, corresponding tothe Ba soul that leaves the tomb to wander in the world, is the present-day narrator drawn toEgypt at the invitation of her brother Ross; Tjeniet (also the term for facience, the vivid blueused to surface materials in ancient Egypt), corresponding to the Ka soul that stays in the tombto accept offerings, is a kind of alter ego of Jeanette, surfacing in the emails Jeanette sends toher sister Nancy and articulating thoughts that she does not quite consciously grasp; and Isis,the Akh soul who travels in the Barque of Re, represents the eternal instantiated in Jeanette asone of her contemporary manifestations.

Going Forth(2001) is fully multimedia, including sound, animation, graphics, and verbaltext. Building on her accomplishments inCalifa (2000), Coverley in this work makes sophisti-cated use of animation, creating skies that roll, views that pan across the inscribed surfaces ofa pyramid, and papyrus images that appear to unroll like a scroll. Steeped in Egyptian history,mythology, religion and art (the work is based on 20 years of research), Coverley imaginesa work in which words count as images and images as words, time has two complementarydimensions of linear progression and eternal return, inscriptions are not merely tokens forwords but powerful spells capable of deciding one’s fate for eternity, and the individual subjectmerges into the archetypes of eternal gods and goddesses. Hypertext is well suited for this kindof exploration, for with its multilinear narration, multimedia capability and unmatched pow-ers of simulation, it enables the fluid combination of different textual elements and multiplepossibilities for their combination and recombination.

Modeled after the spatial arrangement of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the interface employs bothhorizontal and vertical registers. The horizontal panels narrate Jeanette’s first-person adven-tures with (and without) Ross, in which she re-enacts a dynamic of loss and recovery similarto Isis piecing together her murdered brother Osiris’s body, although here it is not literally areassembly of a dismembered body but a remembering of events. The vertical panels are expos-itory, giving linguistic, historical, and geographic information about ancient Egypt, modeled af-ter the rubrics that in hieroglyphic texts give information on how to interpret the depicted events.

The correspondences between Egyptian hieroglyphs and the interface are much more thanwindow dressing. Rather, they suggest deep connections between inscription systems, cos-mological beliefs, temporal orderings and geographic assumptions. Hieroglyphic inscriptionswere written in all directions, including left to right, right to left, up to down, down to up,


edging sideways into margins or spiraling in a circle, with the order of reading indicated bythe direction the figures face. Early Egyptologists assumed this spatial promiscuity was dic-tated by convenience; because the extant hieroglyphs were incised into stone, writers tookadvantage of any available space regardless of its orientation.Going Forth (Coverly, 2001)suggests a different interpretation, relating the omni-directionality of the writing to ancientEgyptian beliefs about the “endless geometry” of the world, in which personages from thepast continue over the threshold of death into the future, and gods and goddesses traveling inthe barque of Re also manifest themselves in humans alive on the earth. One of the rubricsrelates the discovery by ancient Egyptians that the rising of the star Sirius corresponds withthe flooding of the Nile, thus enabling them to make connections between the movement ofthe heavens and the rhythms of the earth and resulting in the concept of an annual cycle,which in turn led to the temporal organization of the calendar into years. Thus, the linearflow of time, associated with the unidirectional flow of the Nile, was overlaid onto a topo-logical scheme cyclical in nature, corresponding both to the annual rising and falling of theNile and cycles of human life in which individuals were seen as reincarnations of eternaldeities.

Given such a cosmology, how would an inscription system be envisioned? The answer,Going Forth(Coverly, 2001) implies, would be to envision the inscription surface as a complextopology in which linear writing takes place within a larger geometry that permits horizontalreversals, up/down orientations, and even spirals and circles. The reading directions forGoingForth emphasize that the interface is scrollable in both directions (left/right and right/left,up/down and down/up), an artistic decision that relates interface design to Egyptian inscriptionsystems and implicitly to an ancient Egyptian worldview. Implementing this design in anelectronic environment further suggests that like the ancient Egyptians, we do not so muchleave history behind as carry it along with us.

The Egyptian practice of assigning both pictographic resemblances and sonic values tohieroglyphs meant that the primary relationship was not between arbitrary mark and corre-sponding sound, but a more complex relation between iconic image, acoustic production, andrecognizable speech. Because there were no sonic values for vowels, the acoustic elementswere underdetermined by themselves (for an equivalent example in English, suppose that animage has the sonic value of “tr,” which depending on the context could stand for “true,” “tar,”“tear,” and so on). Determinates were necessary to eliminate the ambiguity and tie the image tothe correct speech sound. Meaning was thus negotiated among several images, and it was theirinterrelation that determined significance rather than a one-to-one correlation between markand sound. Moreover,Going Forth(Coverly, 2001) suggests that there was no clear distinctionin ancient Egypt between writing and art. Art did not so much imitate life as it imitated andwas imitated by writing, which is another way to say that world view and inscription systemwere intimately related. Transported into an electronic environment, these correlations betweenword and image, sound and mark, icon and icon, take the form of complex relations betweenmultimedia components and navigational functionalities in which meaning emerges from theirinterrelations rather than from the verbal narrative alone.

Going Forthdreams of a richly decorated and potentially infinite inscription surface thatenables fluid transitions between exposition, narrative, maps, photographs, linguistic informa-tion and historical documentation. The ur-text is of course the EgyptianBook of the Dead,


with special emphasis on Spell 64, an incantation so powerful that it was often kept secret andomitted from many versions of theBook of the Dead. More than any other single spell, it wasSpell 64 that was deemed most important in releasing the soul from the scene of judgmentinto eternal life. Dense with numerological meaning, 64 marks the conjunction of the perfectsquare of 8×8, the union of 3 and 4 in 4×4×4, and of 2, 3, and 6 in 2×2×2×2×2×2. Theelectronic work preserves this numerology by creating three different narrators, all of whomare aspects of the same persona, and eight different ways of telling the story, indicated bythe row of eight icons at the top of the screen. In addition, the emphasis in theBook of theDeadon getting the spell exactly right has its parallel in getting the code exactly right. A spellincorrectly articulated fails to produce the desired result, just as code with an incorrect syntaxfails to work when processed on the computer. Both function as what I have elsewhere called“material metaphors,” for they enable a transfer of sense to take place between verbal formu-lation and material circumstances, for example by releasing the soul from the underworld orcausing the computer to generate a screen display.

The conjunction between spell and code foregrounds the fact that electronic literature has adifferent materiality than a print book. Strictly speaking, an electronic text is aprocessratherthan an artifact one can hold in one’s hand. It cannot be accurately said to reside in a CD-ROM,a diskette, or even on a server; what exists at such locations are simply data and commands.Coming into existence as a text the user can experience requires that the appropriate softwarerun on the right hardware. If the software is obsolete or if the operating system cannot recognizethe commands, in a literal sense the work does not exist. The specificity of this ontologicalcondition requires us to rethink many of the presuppositions that have evolved through thedeep time of the print tradition. Hardware and software act not merely as vehicles to delivertext but rather enter consequentially and dynamically into the production of the text as such.Every act of reading electronic literature therefore takes place within a distributed cognitivesystem that includes both human and non-human actors.

Moving deeper into the machine means actively engaging these conditions of productionand using them as resources for artistic creation. Interrogating the interfacedatabase, devel-oping a creolized language of English and code (“][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode,”), craftingmetaphors that connect the interface and the human face (Translucidity), using multimediacapabilities to create synergistic effects (St. Caterina) and figuring the screen as a writing sur-face that embodies a world view (Going Forth) are strategies that have no exact equivalentsin print texts. As electronic literature matures, it develops rhetorics, grammars, and syntaxesunique to digital environments. It calls forth from us new modes of attending—listening, see-ing, moving, navigating—that transform what it means to experience literature (“read” is nolonger an adequate term). If each era develops a literature that helps it understand (or cre-ate) what it is becoming, a better comprehension of our posthuman condition requires a fullrange of literary expression, print and electronic. If the future that electronic literature enactsis our future as well, we can encourage our students to engage with it by expanding the rangeof our rhetorical attention to include all the diverse semiotic components offered by com-positional practices in electronic environments. The feedback loops that connect writing andreading, composition and analysis operate differently in digital media, and only when we arefully aware of the specificity of multimedia production will we exploit it for the remarkableresource it is.


References

Borges, Jorge Luis. (1988). “The Immortal.” InLabyrinths: Selected short stories and other writings(pp. 105–118).New York: W.W. Norton.

Cayley, John. (2002). The code is not in the text. In Friedrich W. Bloch, Christiane Heibach, & Karin Wenz (Eds.),POesIs: Poetics in digital text. Vienna: Triton (forthcoming).

Coverley, M. D. (2002).The book of going forth by day. Retrieved June 15, 2002, from<http://califia.hispeed.com/Egypt/>.

Manovich, Lev. (2001).The language of new media(pp. 212–285). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Memmott, Talan. (2002a). Ecephalopedia||novellex, Drunken Boat #3. Retrieved June 15, 2002, from

<http://www.drunkenboat.com>.Memmott, Talan. (2002b).Translucidity, frAme #6. Retrieved June 15, 2002, from<http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/frame6/>.MEZ. (2002a). Retrieved June 15, 2002, from<http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete>.MEZ. (2002b). Retrieved June 15, 2002, from<http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/netwurker/>.Raley, Rita. (2001). Reveal codes: Hypertext and performance.Postmodern Culture12.1. Retrieved June 15, 2002,

from <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v012/12.1raley.html>.de Saussure, Ferdinand. (1965).A general course in linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill.



http://www.drunkenboat.com

http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/frame6/

http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/netwurker/

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v012/12.1raley.html

Documents

Deeper into the machine: Learning to speak digital